#YouTubeRewind is back and we’re in love with The Shape of 2017. This year, you gave us your best reggaeton moves, witnessed an eclipse, and fell in love with a pregnant giraffe. There were, of course, difficult moments too, and community and togetherness felt as important as ever.

Our annual mashup brought together more amazing talent than ever before -- nearly 300 creators, viral stars, musicians, and surprise guests to be exact! -- from over 20 countries, uniting to look back at the biggest, strangest, (squishiest?), and most impactful trends of the year, from silly to solemn, that made pop culture in 2017 what it was. With fidget spinners. Obviously.

Want to be a Rewind expert? Learn about the trends and memes referenced in the video, as well as the creators who pitched in to make it possible, here. And if you already fancy yourself one, test your knowledge with our trivia game.

We're also revealing 2017's top trending videos and top music videos, according to time spent watching, sharing, commenting, liking, and more. Some familiar faces are back (Dude Perfect, Bad Lip Reading, James Corden) and some incredible talents in choreography, animation, and live performance join them. This year’s list of top trending videos represents the unbelievable diversity of creativity shared on YouTube every day and around the world.

Collectively, this year's top 10 trending videos have more than 630 million views and people spent more than a collective 40 million hours watching them. They span from much-loved YouTube creators and traditional media formats to new and innovative voices in art and entertainment.

2017 saw some major new records broken in music, most notably by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee's massive global hit. "Despacito" sits at the top of 2017's top music video list -- not just as the most-viewed music video for the year, but as the most viewed YouTube video of all time. A truly global list, this year's top 10 music videos feature artists from Puerto Rico, Colombia, France, Spain, Cuba, the United States and the U.K, and six of the videos feature Latin artists, up from just one video in 2016.

Snoop Dogg and Desiigner rock out to Frank Sinatra, Melissa McCarthy saves the whales, and two very dedicated Samsung servicemen trek through Chandu’s sheep to help the most amazing kids ever. As 2017 comes to an end, these are the best moments from the top ads of the year.

In our annual year-end edition of the YouTube Ads Leaderboard, we’re celebrating the ads that got the most views, shares, and all around love from YouTube audiences across the globe. Together, they generated 539 million views, 14 million hours of watch time and 3.6 million likes (with an impressive 3 million of those going to YouTube’s Dude Perfect).

While each ad stood out for its own unique reason, inclusion, diversity and empowerment were the popular themes in this year’s list. Brands like adidas showed us a new generation of Originals, Budweiser told the inspiring story of founders Anheuser and Busch, and Samsung claimed the number one spot with a video that got 100 million views in its first seven weeks.

And we’ve got more. Starting today, you can vote for your favorite ads at #TheYouTubeAd of 2017. Tell us which ads made you laugh the hardest, cry the most, or inspired you to take a stand.

As the CEO of YouTube, I’ve seen how our open platform has been a force for creativity, learning and access to information. I’ve seen how activists have used it to advocate for social change, mobilize protests, and document war crimes. I’ve seen how it serves as both an entertainment destination and a video library for the world. I’ve seen how it has expanded economic opportunity, allowing small businesses to market and sell their goods across borders. And I’ve seen how it has helped enlighten my children, giving them a bigger, broader understanding of our world and the billions who inhabit it.

But I’ve also seen up-close that there can be another, more troubling, side of YouTube’s openness. I’ve seen how some bad actors are exploiting our openness to mislead, manipulate, harass or even harm.

In the last year, we took actions to protect our community against violent or extremist content, testing new systems to combat emerging and evolving threats. We tightened our policies on what content can appear on our platform, or earn revenue for creators. We increased our enforcement teams. And we invested in powerful new machine learning technology to scale the efforts of our human moderators to take down videos and comments that violate our policies.

Now, we are applying the lessons we’ve learned from our work fighting violent extremism content over the last year in order to tackle other problematic content. Our goal is to stay one step ahead of bad actors, making it harder for policy-violating content to surface or remain on YouTube.

More people reviewing more content
Human reviewers remain essential to both removing content and training machine learning systems because human judgment is critical to making contextualized decisions on content. Since June, our trust and safety teams have manually reviewed nearly 2 million videos for violent extremist content, helping train our machine-learning technology to identify similar videos in the future. We are also taking aggressive action on comments, launching new comment moderation tools and in some cases shutting down comments altogether. In the last few weeks we’ve used machine learning to help human reviewers find and terminate hundreds of accounts and shut down hundreds of thousands of comments. Our teams also work closely with NCMEC, the IWF, and other child safety organizations around the world to report predatory behavior and accounts to the correct law enforcement agencies.

We will continue the significant growth of our teams into next year, with the goal of bringing the total number of people across Google working to address content that might violate our policies to over 10,000 in 2018.

At the same time, we are expanding the network of academics, industry groups and subject matter experts who we can learn from and support to help us better understand emerging issues.

Tackling issues at scale
We will use our cutting-edge machine learning more widely to allow us to quickly and efficiently remove content that violates our guidelines. In June we deployed this technology to flag violent extremist content for human review and we’ve seen tremendous progress.

Since June we have removed over 150,000 videos for violent extremism.

Machine learning is helping our human reviewers remove nearly five times as many videos than they were previously.

Today, 98 percent of the videos we remove for violent extremism are flagged by our machine-learning algorithms.

Our advances in machine learning let us now take down nearly 70 percent of violent extremist content within eight hours of upload and nearly half of it in two hours and we continue to accelerate that speed.

Since we started using machine learning to flag violent and extremist content in June, the technology has reviewed and flagged content that would have taken 180,000 people working 40 hours a week to assess.

Because we have seen these positive results, we have begun training machine-learning technology across other challenging content areas, including child safety and hate speech.

Greater transparency
We understand that people want a clearer view of how we’re tackling problematic content. Our Community Guidelines give users notice about what we do not allow on our platforms and we want to share more information about how these are enforced. That’s why in 2018 we will be creating a regular report where we will provide more aggregate data about the flags we receive and the actions we take to remove videos and comments that violate our content policies. We are looking into developing additional tools to help bring even more transparency around flagged content.

A new approach to advertising on YouTube
We’re also taking actions to protect advertisers and creators from inappropriate content. We want advertisers to have peace of mind that their ads are running alongside content that reflects their brand’s values. Equally, we want to give creators confidence that their revenue won’t be hurt by the actions of bad actors.

We believe this requires a new approach to advertising on YouTube, carefully considering which channels and videos are eligible for advertising. We are planning to apply stricter criteria, conduct more manual curation, while also significantly ramping up our team of ad reviewers to ensure ads are only running where they should. This will also help vetted creators see more stability around their revenue. It’s important we get this right for both advertisers and creators, and over the next few weeks, we’ll be speaking with both to hone this approach.

We are taking these actions because it’s the right thing to do. Creators make incredible content that builds global fan bases. Fans come to YouTube to watch, share, and engage with this content. Advertisers, who want to reach those people, fund this creator economy. Each of these groups is essential to YouTube’s creative ecosystem—none can thrive on YouTube without the other—and all three deserve our best efforts.

As challenges to our platform evolve and change, our enforcement methods must and will evolve to respond to them. But no matter what challenges emerge, our commitment to combat them will be sustained and unwavering. We will take the steps necessary to protect our community and ensure that YouTube continues to be a place where creators, advertisers, and viewers can thrive.Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube

In recent months, we've noticed a growing trend around content on YouTube that attempts to pass as family-friendly, but is clearly not. While some of these videos may be suitable for adults, others are completely unacceptable, so we are working to remove them from YouTube. Here’s what we’re doing:

Tougher application of our Community Guidelines and faster enforcement through technology: We have always had strict policies against child endangerment, and we partner closely with regional authorities and experts to help us enforce these policies and report to law enforcement through NCMEC. In the last couple of weeks we expanded our enforcement guidelines around removing content featuring minors that may be endangering a child, even if that was not the uploader’s intent. In the last week we terminated over 50 channels and have removed thousands of videos under these guidelines, and we will continue to work quickly to remove more every day. We also implemented policies to age-restrict (only available to people over 18 and logged in) content with family entertainment characters but containing mature themes or adult humor. To help surface potentially violative content, we are applying machine learning technology and automated tools to quickly find and escalate for human review.

Removing ads from inappropriate videos targeting families: Back in June, we posted an update to our advertiser-friendly guidelines making it clear that we will remove ads from any content depicting family entertainment characters engaged in violent, offensive, or otherwise inappropriate behavior, even if done for comedic or satirical purposes. Since June, we've removed ads from 3M videos under this policy and we’ve further strengthened the application of that policy to remove ads from another 500K violative videos.

Blocking inappropriate comments on videos featuring minors: We have historically used a combination of automated systems and human flagging and review to remove inappropriate sexual or predatory comments on videos featuring minors. Comments of this nature are abhorrent and we work with NCMEC to report illegal behavior to law enforcement. Starting this week we will begin taking an even more aggressive stance by turning off all comments on videos of minors where we see these types of comments.

Providing guidance for creators who make family-friendly content: We've created a platform for people to view family-friendly content -- YouTube Kids. We want to help creators produce quality content for the YouTube Kids app, so in the coming weeks we will release a comprehensive guide on how creators can make enriching family content for the app.

Engaging and learning from experts: While there is some content that clearly doesn’t belong on YouTube, there is other content that is more nuanced or challenging to make a clear decision on. For example, today, there are many cartoons in mainstream entertainment that are targeted towards adults, and feature characters doing things we wouldn’t necessarily want children to see. Those may be OK for YouTube.com, or if we require the viewer to be over 18, but not for someone younger. Similarly, an adult dressed as a popular family character could be questionable content for some audiences, but could also be meant for adults recorded at a comic book convention. To help us better understand how to treat this content, we will be growing the number of experts we work with, and doubling the number of Trusted Flaggers we partner with in this area.

Across the board we have scaled up resources to ensure that thousands of people are working around the clock to monitor, review and make the right decisions across our ads and content policies. These latest enforcement changes will take shape over the weeks and months ahead as we work to tackle this evolving challenge. We’re wholly committed to addressing these issues and will continue to invest the engineering and human resources needed to get it right. As a parent and as a leader in this organization, I’m determined that we do.

At YouTube, we understand the importance of helping artists find ways to build deeper connections with their fans -- the ones who not only watch and listen to videos, but are also willing to pay to see live performances. And, with live concerts becoming a bigger driver of revenue for artists, we want to help artists reach those fans, keep them updated about upcoming shows, and sell more tickets.

We’ve been experimenting with ways we can offer a ticketing experience to fans and we’re excited to announce our first ticketing partnership with Ticketmaster. Starting today, we will begin featuring hundreds of artist’s upcoming U.S. tour dates on their YouTube videos. Fans enjoying an artist's official music video on YouTube can now learn about upcoming concert listings and with a simple click, go to Ticketmaster to purchase tickets.

YouTube’s massive fan base paired with Ticketmaster’s global roster of concerts and security of verified tickets means we can easily connect a fan’s discovery of music on YouTube to their ability to purchase concert tickets.

We’re just getting started. We’ll be rolling out this feature to all artists who have Ticketmaster shows in North America with plans to expand globally. And, as part of our ongoing commitment to support artists, we’ll continue to find additional ways to make meaningful fan and artist connections.

From heartwarming homecoming videos to personal vlogs about their service experiences, veterans turn to YouTube to help share their stories and form community. Thanks to their videos, we’ve been able to learn about some of the incredible individuals who serve our country, whether it’s Missy Lynn speaking out about her experience in the Air Force, Nick Bare chronicling his journey from the start of a new business to his last day in the Army, or a son sharing his Army Veteran father’s experience with dementia.

Ahead of this year's Veterans Day, YouTube is sharing a new video to honor veterans for their service and all of the things they do every day -- for their families, for their communities, and for our nation. To those of us who haven’t served, Veterans Day is also an opportunity for us to better understand what it means to be a member of the armed forces — in any country — and the contributions and sacrifices that military personnel and their families make on our behalf.

Every Veterans Day, we see a resurgence in popularity of certain video genres on YouTube, including surprise reunions and homecoming videos. Millions of people have been moved by these videos of veterans coming together with their loved ones, so to pay tribute to these special moments, we’re also revealing a list of top viewed veteran homecoming videos on the platform:

“Back then there was salsa,” reflects 25-year-old Puerto Rican superstar Ozuna in the new documentary “Musica Sin Fronteras.” “In another era you had rock, then you had time for electronic music. Well now today it’s time for reggaeton.”

Led by the meteoric rise of “Despacito,” with its 4 billion views and counting, reggaeton and other Latin genres have dominated YouTube’s charts all year, with no signs of slowing. Currently, six of the top ten music videos on YouTube’s charts are by Latin artists, with tracks like J Balvin’s “Mi Gente” looking like they might give “Despacito” a run for its record-breaking money.

Arriving right on cue is Ozuna, who for the past three weeks has reigned at the top slot of the global YouTube Artists chart. Produced by YouTube, “Musica Sin Fronteras” traces Ozuna’s rise from local talent shows at his school to the biggest stages in the world, all while celebrating Puerto Rico’s vibrant musical culture.

“YouTube is a universal platform that allows me to reach people in Japan, China or Egypt, countries that I would never be able to reach otherwise” the San Juan, Puerto Rico, native explains. “It is the most important platform to reach the entire world.”

Writing his first song at the young age of 12, Ozuna found early inspiration from other Puerto Rican artists who turned to YouTube to spread their music. What followed were a series of do-it-yourself videos showcasing the young singer and songwriter’s undeniable raw talent. “They were low-budget videos: just us in the rain with a camera and an umbrella." Ozuna explains with a laugh. "But they came from the heart. It was starting something from nothing.”

With time the production quality increased — and so did the view counts. Early fan favorites like 2015’s “Si Tu Marido No Te Quiere” crossed 100 million views within a year of being uploaded. But while this early work established the Puerto Rican native as an undeniable star, it was the release of his debut LP “Odisea” that helped Ozuna truly cement a chapter in reggaeton’s global success. A vast departure from the EDM maximalism that reggaeton was known for in the mid-’00s, the album’s distinct sound — replete with glowing trap beats, arresting dembow rhythms and Ozuna’s unmistakable falsetto — resonated far beyond San Juan, earning massive views in places like Bogotá (317 million), Mexico City (285 million), New York (74 million) and Barcelona (31 million). Ozuna’s subscriber count now stands at over 8.1 million, with his total views across the platform recently crossing the 8 billion views mark.

“I carefully try to plan how I release my music,” Ozuna explains of his continued viral success. “I start by uploading my music videos to YouTube before anywhere else. This is to guide everyone to one single place. That way they can enjoy the full experience: the song, the visuals, the meaning.”

It’s a strategy the singer took to new heights with the video for “Siguelo Bailando,” the latest single from his debut. Teaming with YouTube, Ozuna is leveraging the power of his social media following to speed up the release of the highly anticipated video — when the hashtag #SigueloBailando hits 20,000, fans across the world can simultaneously experience the video’s premiere on YouTube.

For Ozuna, the creative release is yet another way to spread his music to wider and wider audiences. “I put on YouTube one single and, in 20 hours, have 5 million, 6 million people,” the crooner recently explained to the New York Times on his continued success. “In one month, I have 100 million. In one year, 1 billion.”The YouTube Music Team